My Passion, My Life v2.0

At last, I managed to spend some time to blog about my travel. Should have blogged about this Macao trip of mine long time ago. Let me begin with the planning part.

Trip Objective: Food Galore and Budget Travelling

For a budget trip, as usual, Air Asia provides the cheapest air ticket all the way from LCCT in Sepang to Macao International Airport. Needless to say, I managed to get my return tickets for roughly around RM300++ of which I booked 3 months prior to my trip.

Photo Credit: AirHostess.info - p/s Look at RM9.99, not the chicks!

Most people would take this budget airline transit before making their way ultimately to Hong Kong as this is rather a cheaper alternative if you don’t want to spend extra money for travelling on a direct flight. Not for my case, my trip does not include Hong Kong as my mom, my elder brother and I decided to spend more time travelling in Macao and Zhuhai in this 4D 3N trip. So, 2 days Zhuhai, 2 days Macao… just nice.

Let me focus about Macao. I practically planned my whole trip and my bro is too busy with his work. So, I spent about one week to get the cheapest deals, right from hotels to food and to interesting places to go. For newbies like me, this www.macau.com website is by far the best site for tourist. You will get all information that you need, although it might not be the best, but it is certainly very close to the best deal you will ever get. Most important of all, it has pin-point directions of nice places to go and even the best restaurant to eat! No, I’m not doing a review for this site but this is in my honest opinion.

So is it Macao or Macau?  Well, seriously, I don’t really know. It is spelt differently all over the places and guess the common answer that I get is… “Who cares? It is the same.”

You’ll probably be looking for accomodation prior to any other related searches. Macao has a long list of hotels and the island itself is mainly about tourism. High-end hotels like The Venetian Macao, Grand Lisboa Hotel and the Las Vegas based hotels like Wynn, MGM Grand… they are all there! If you are looking for middle range or backpackers lodging, there are also some affordable ones. Get your pricing list at www.macau.com ok? I checked numerous times, it is more or less near to the actual price set by each hotel.

I was lucky to get to stay at the brand new The Venetian Macao. Got a superb deal from my eldest bro’s friend who is a hotel concierge manager and we were treated like kings and queens in the resort. Click here to read about my stay at this luxurious hotel.

When you are about to book for your accomodation, comes the next question - What currency are they using? Macanese Pataca or Hong Kong Dollar… or Chinese Renmenbi? Fret not, this island is so special that they usually accept all these 3 currencies. Even if you go to the roadside stalls, they still accept those currencies. But as a measure of precaution, you are advised to exchange to some Macanese Patacas, afterall it is Macau anyway.

So, off I flew to Macao from KL with a flight duration of close to 4 hours, if I’m not mistaken. Our initial plan was to get to Zhuhai directly from Macao International Airport, however in this post, I will skip the Zhuhai part and concentrate more on Macao first. At the airport, you would never imagine what was the first thing we did. It was pretty late evening approaching 7pm and off we ate at the airport. Surprisingly, they have this restaurant which serves super delicious Spicy Beef Noodle. Well, you can’t blame of for this cos I ain’t eating the microwave’ed Nasi Lemak served by the Air Asia cabin crew. It is pretty disturbing especially the people sitting in front and back of me eating these Nasi Lemaks and thus making the whole plane smells like Nasi ”Air Asia” Lemak. Budget airline, couldn’t complain much though.

The best thing about Macao is the free public transport provided not by the government, but by the hotels! Competition is so tough that each hotel is dying to grab their potential customers just about where ever you tourists may go. Right from the airport doorstep, you will be able to see so many hotel promoters waiting to hook you up to their hotel. Even if you are not one of the patrons, you can just step into the bus and they would drive you to the heart of the city and several tourist spots.

Hotel bus, they are not like those filthy Metrobus in KL or the minibus we used to have in Penang. They are brand new buses, clean and very well air-conditioned. They even have this alternating light display in the bus equipped with LCD screens which promotes tourism in Macao.

Most of the time in Macao, we switched buses from different hotels to travel to different destinations. Convenient and cheap right? LOL… I felt pretty much guilty at first, but when I actually asked one of the hotel concierge, they said it is already a norm, of which the hotel holds the concept of treating all tourist as their guests! Thumbs up! Toes also UP!

I felt that I left too much thing in my previous post about The Venetian Macao, so let me continue it here ok? I practically spent one full day going around this magnificent hotel and resort. This hotel is located on the island of Taipa, just beside the main island of the Macao Peninsula. I had arranged a day to spend in this resort and rather spend the other day by travelling around the main city. More efficient this way as I do not want to miss the chance of a lifetime staying and enjoying to the fullest in this luxury hotel.

It is so huge that they have built almost the entire Venezia in this resort. Gondolas, the Canals, the shops… all inside a closed arena, a controlled climate whereby the weather is constantly controlled according to the time. Truly a city that never sleeps.

Food? I couldn’t count how many restaurants are there but one thing I can assure you that the Food Arena or the Food Court is always filled with people. Western Food, Chinese Food, Indian Food, Italian Food, Japanese Sushi, you name it, you got it!

Asian Delicacy

and they even have Phat Burger: Helping The Fat People Getting Slimmer

Shops? Ferragamo, Gucci, Prada, Piaget, Audemars Piguet, and all the branded-and-unheard-of shops are there. Just make sure you’re loaded or at least with a credit card with no credit limit with you.

Hmm… I guess that all for now. Stay tuned for Part II of Macao Travel Guide. I will be bringing you around the city and behold… more food galore coming up next!

Only on My Passion, My Life v2.0.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under Activities, Entertainment, Food, Travel.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.